“Are you sure that thing is working properly?” Rudi asked, nodding at the laptop.
“If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be able to read anything at all.”
Rudi picked up one of the pages of lists and looked helplessly at it. “This is...” He shook his head. “
A Gazetteer of the Towns and Villages of Ernshire
,” he read.
Lev shrugged. “A fiction.”
Rudi dropped the sheet of paper on the coffee table and stood up and limped over to the window.
“Do you want me to stay?” Lev asked.
Rudi looked round. “I’m sorry?”
“The laptop works itself. All you have to do is type in the groups. You don’t need me any more.”
Rudi shook his head. “Could this
Gazetteer
be a code itself?”
“Of course. Take such and such letters from each line and you get a message.
The Komsomol flies at night
.”
“Can the laptop scan for that kind of thing?”
“Yes, but it would be quicker if you had the key.”
“Which would be...?”
Lev picked up the old railway timetable and riffled its pages speculatively.
“I looked,” Rudi said. “There are no marks. Nothing to suggest any of those entries is any more significant than the others. And before you ask, I did the thing of letting it fall open on its own, too. Nothing. Nothing obvious, anyway.”
“Perhaps the key will turn up further on in the text itself,” Lev theorised. “Although that would be quite unsecure.” He added, “I don’t want you to think I’m milking this job.”
Rudi broke into a broad smile. “Why on Earth would I think that?”
Lev gestured at the decrypts.
Rudi shook his head. “Whatever is going on here, it’s not your fault, Lev. Stay around; let’s see if we can make any sense of this, okay?”
Lev nodded. “Okay.”
A
LTHOUGH MAKING SENSE
of it was easier said than done. The Gazetteer ended, and the notebook began to yield up a history and description of a country which did not exist.
Taking as its jumping-off point the typewritten fiction which Lev had first translated, the notebook’s unknown writer went on to speak of a nation he called
The Community
. The Community was the Whitton-Whytes’ greatest dream, a country mapped over the top of the whole of Europe and entirely populated by Englishmen. It sounded like the setting for an enormous Agatha Christie mystery, all county towns and vicarages and manor houses. Rudi thought it was a blessing that Fabio hadn’t lived to see just how worthless his great prize had been.
On the other hand...
Lev’s laptop delivered three pages of decrypts a day. After the twelfth day, Rudi began to feel a vague unease, and for no reason he could have articulated and against Lev’s loud protests, he booked them out of the hotel and moved them to another island.
A week later, he located the source of his unease.
One night, going through the contents of the burnbox, he took out the map of the Line again, rolled it out onto the floor of their room, weighted the corners down with ashtrays and beer bottles, and got down on hands and knees to examine it properly.
He had, he realised, been going about this the wrong way. Fabio had risked his life – had risked
both
their lives – to steal what appeared to be a perfectly standard map, one you could buy at most post offices in most countries. Fabio was eccentric and irresponsible, but he was not stupid. Therefore, it must not be a perfectly standard map. This much should have been obvious to him immediately, and probably would have been if the decrypts hadn’t captured so much of his attention.
“I’m ashamed of myself,” he told Lev. “The map should have been the first thing I looked at. And me a Coureur.”
Lev, who was sitting on the sofa reading the day’s product and drinking vodka, only grunted.
Here was the Line, and if you had any reservations about its name, here was the proof. It really was just a line, a stitch that ran across Europe, a country thousands of kilometres long but only ten kilometres across at its broadest point. Here were the towns it ran through, the marshalling yards and embassies and consulates, branch lines, maintenance depots... branch lines...
Rudi leaned down until his nose was a few centimetres from the surface of the map. The Line needed branches for shunting, and for repair crews, and to connect it to some embassies and consulates, as in Poznań, and to bring supplies in from the countries it passed through. In a lot of ways, it was less independent than it liked to pretend. Running his finger along the twin tracks of the main Line, Rudi could see dozens of branches curling off, to a depot here, a town there.
And some of them seemed to curl off into nowhere.
At the end of one branch, just before the border between Greater Germany and Poland, was a word he recognised:
Stanhurst
.
Rudi got up and picked up the previous day’s decrypts. And there it was.
Stanhurst, a beguiling county town, contains one of the greatest cathedrals in the Community.
He grabbed the railway timetable and began to page through it, and within a minute there it was. Train times from Paddington to Stanhurst.
Lev looked up from his reading. “What?”
“Pack,” Rudi told him. “Pack quickly. We’re leaving. It’s not a novel. It’s a
guidebook.
”
I
T WAS A
guidebook to a country which did not exist.
With what Rudi later described as an act of kneejerk sarcasm, Lev instantly dubbed it
The Baedeker
. For want of any other name, its anonymous author became
Baedeker.
The Community stretched from the Iberian peninsula to a little east of Moscow, a country of some fifteen million souls back in 1918, when the notebook had been written. It had cities and towns and a railway system, but Rudi didn’t recognise any of the names of the towns and cities. It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-Whytes and their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it. However they had achieved it, they had not lacked ambition. According to Baedeker, the Community had a university the size of an English county.
“No,” Lev said, already more than a little annoyed at having to move for the fourth time. “No.”
“What else could it be?” said Rudi.
“An invisible country? Made up of bits and pieces of other countries? Created by a family of English magicians?” Lev snorted. “It could be
anything
else.”
Rudi looked at the piles of decrypts. “There’s nothing here about them being magicians,” he said. “They talk about landscapes containing
all possible
landscapes. That doesn’t sound like magic to me.”
“You’ve obviously had a more interesting life than I have, then,” Lev said sourly, pouring himself another drink. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look at me. No, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Good. Now, say after me, ‘landscapes
do not
contain all possible landscapes.’” He sat back. “You’re not going to say it, are you,” he muttered sourly, and drained his glass.
Rudi looked at the printout pages, the Baedeker, the railway timetable which said that back in 1912 you could have caught a train from Paddington Station to a nonexistent town somewhere to the west of London, the map of the Line that said you could still get to that same nonexistent town by going up a branch line in Germany. He tried to reassemble it in his head, but the pieces would only go together in one configuration.
This was what Fabio had stolen from the Line’s consulate in Poznań. Three proofs of the existence of a parallel universe. And a map showing how to get into it.
The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map. Its capital, Władysław, occupied more or less the same space as Prague, but the way Baedecker described it, it sounded more like a mixture of Kraków, Warsaw, Paris and Geneva. Fifteen million people, back when Baedeker wrote his guidebook. How many people were there in the Community by now? What were they all doing?
Was that a secret worth protecting? Worth killing for? Rudi thought it probably was.
O
NE NIGHT, WHILE
they were eating dinner – something quite inedible involving squid and aubergines and a sauce made from tinned tomatoes – Rudi looked across the room and saw Fabio’s burnbox sitting beside the coffee table. It occurred to him that this thing which Fabio had risked his life to safeguard had become so familiar that he hardly saw it now; it was just somewhere he stuffed the documents and decrypts and Lev’s computer when they changed hotels. He still set the locks, just in case, though he had no way of knowing if the device even worked after all this time.
“What,” Lev said, watching him stand up.
Rudi limped over to the burnbox and upended it over his bed. Pages and notebooks and flashcards cascaded onto the coverlet. “I just wanted to try something.”
“Try what?”
Righting the burnbox, he stuffed a printout copy of yesterday’s local newspaper inside, closed the lid, spun the combination, swiped the lock twice to arm the device. “I want to see what happens when this thing goes off,” he said. Then he twisted the latches and pressed them outward.
What happened was Lev screaming, jumping up from the table, and diving behind the room’s monumentally-ugly sofa. A few moments later he bobbed up again, shaking his head.
“Never let it be said that Lev Semyonovitch Laptev ever failed to over-react,” said Rudi, who hadn’t moved from beside the bed.
“Sometimes,” Lev said, attempting to regain his composure without yelling, “a burnbox is designed to destroy its contents
and
the person who is trying to open it.”
Rudi looked at the box. “Oh.” He put his hand on the side of the briefcase, and, yes, it was warm. Not hot, but definitely warm, the flash-heat inside leaking through the insulation.
All of which made him think nostalgically of the briefcase he had taken delivery of in Old Potsdam. He’d worried that the act of smuggling it to Berlin might have destroyed it or what was inside, but what if the Package had triggered it before slinging it under the wire? What if it had been cooking its contents the whole time? What if it had contained
maps
?
So why, in their last moments of life, had the Package slung the briefcase through the wire, if it was in the process of destroying its contents? In Rudi’s world there was only one reason to do that – to get people running, to make the people who wanted the case back believe it had been delivered. And Bradley had said that the contents had got through, so either he knew the case had destroyed whatever it contained, and had been lying, or he didn’t know and had been passing on a lie told to him by his superiors.
He had other things to think about. There was the steady stream of decrypts, page by page building up a picture of the Community of the nineteenth century. There were the more mundane mechanics of getting himself and Lev from hotel to hotel, from island to island.
And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about Potsdam, going around and around, picking away at it.
Rudi sat for hours with the printout of the Baedeker, shuffling the pages, waiting for the
movie moment
, the moment when the hero claps his hand to his forehead and cries,
of course!
The moment when all becomes clear.
It didn’t happen.
This was a Big Secret, certainly. No doubt about that. Easily worth killing both Fabio and himself. But the geometry of what had happened to him over the past ten years or so eluded him. He was certain that Potsdam fitted into that geometry, somehow, but it was impossible to say precisely
how
.
Taking the Baedeker as his guiding principle, his entire career as a Coureur took on a different aspect. There was one phrase in the book,
The Community has the most jealously guarded borders in Europe
, which altered everything. How many governments, intelligence services, espionage organisations and criminal groups knew about the Community and had tried, over the years, to gain entry? If he had learned anything from his years wandering around Europe, it was that people really hated to find places that they could not go. Thus, safecrackers broke into banks, MI6 officers passed through Checkpoint Charlie, CIA
rezidents
ran networks of stringers in Moscow and Bucharest. Oh yes, they were stealing the company payroll or gathering intelligence on the enemy. But, really, when it came down to it, they were going where others
could not go
. Rudi was aware of the sense of power, the sense of
omnicompetence
, one could derive from something like that
And the Community had defeated them. They had not been able to gain access.
Whoever they were – and he didn’t rule out a committee of
apparatchiks
representing Central and every intelligence community in Europe – these were subtle men and women. Rudi thought that much of his time as a Coureur had been devoted to provocations – not to breaking into the Community directly, but to flushing them out like a beater on a grouse moor. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? The eternal questions of the intelligence controller.
It was possible that his first live Situation with Fabio had been a legitimate attempt to steal the map of entryways into the Community. Equally, it could have been an operation to flush out a Community operative in Poznań’s Line consulate, someone who could then have been identified, arrested, interrogated, turned and fed back into the Community to report back to their new masters. It might have been a success, or it might have been a failure. Or it might genuinely have been Fabio acting on his own initiative. He would never know.
Similarly, the Situation in Potsdam (and perhaps even the one in the Zone, he had always thought there was something not quite
right
about that one) and the death of Leo had something of the stage about them, something with larger objectives than the individual players would ever be able to perceive.